Dreamtime weavers

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Weaver Kantjupayi Benson, who organised the project, in front of the grass creation at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.Photo: Glenn Campbell

The judges said they had never seen anything like it. A
funny-looking Toyota Land Cruiser woven from desert country grass
with a doll driver and rusty iron wheels has won this year's
Telstra Indigenous Art Award, the richest award in indigenous
art.

Twenty women weavers from Blackstone, a remote community in far
north Western Australia, near the Northern Territory border, will
share the $40,000 prize.

"I was looking for something that had the wow factor," said
Melbourne artist Destiny Deacon, one of the two judges of the
award, presented last night in Darwin.

"You can smell it," she said. "It's traditional weaving. It
shows what is the reality for indigenous people today."

The other judge, Queensland Art Gallery director Doug Hall, said
the entry, The Tjanpi (grass) Toyota, was deliberately
quirky.

"You look at people when they walk towards the work. They
smile," Mr Hall said. "That's a really nice reaction to have for
contemporary indigenous art."

Mr Hall said the women's work celebrated the Toyota. "Modern
living for Aboriginal people in the bush doesn't exist without the
four-wheel-drive vehicle," he said. "So you have these nice
interconnections about the way Aboriginal people live and their
culture with this one particular work of art."

One of the weavers, Kantjupayi Benson, a respected senior law
woman in her 70s, spoke shyly through an interpreter to journalists
at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. "We make
many different things with needles and string  animals and
things like that," she said.

"We made a big boat but it broke so we made the Toyota."

Ms Benson said she didn't know how she would spend her share of
the prize.

The women took 3½ weeks to make the Toyota, sitting in a
sweltering community hall. Telstra will exhibit it around
Australia.

"I don't know how they are going to transport it. But that's
somebody else's problem, not the judges'," Mr Hall said.

Evelyn Pultara, from the Northern Territory community of Utopia,
won the general painting award; Banduk Marika, from Yirrkala, won
the bark painting section, and Gayle Maddigan, from Mandurang in
Victoria, won the works on paper award for her work Remembered
Ritual.

The Wandjuk Marika Three-Dimensional Memorial Award was won by
Yirrkala artist Naminapu Maymuru-White for her work
Milngiyawuy.